Reduxx has learned that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health referenced a fetish forum co-founded by a convicted pedophile while crafting their most recent standards of care. Thomas Pidel, whose forum was sourced by WPATH, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after he was discovered to have been involved in a pedophile ring.
In 2021, WPATH released a draft of its 8th edition of its Standards of Care, a guideline used for transgender health care and legislative policy. As previously revealed by Reduxx, WPATH referenced a castration fetish forum in the Standards of Care, which the association used to outline a “eunuch” gender identity.
Reduxx identified several individuals who had high-ranking memberships or administrative privileges on the forum, revealing that a number of them were academics who had worked closely with WPATH. Reduxx also found that the forum, known as the Eunuch Archive, hosted thousands of pieces of fictional child sexual abuse fantasies that involved the erotic castration of little boys.
It has now been learned that one of the founding members of the forum is a convicted pedophile who was involved in a child sexual exploitation ring.
Thomas Pidel, who once operated a youth hostel, was sentenced to 15 years in prison and classified as a Level 3 sex offender in 2005 after his disturbing activities were uncovered by police. The predator was linked to over a dozen individuals who had subscriptions with a Belarus-based child pornography enterprise which sold thousands of paid memberships internationally to access child sexual abuse content.
Reduxx identified Pidel by corroborating archived websites and Usenet forum posts with historical news reports and court records.
Pidel, who described himself as a “boy lover,” was active in multiple Usenet groups dedicated to pedophilia activism and castration fetishism in the years just before his arrest in 2004. Some of the groups Pidel was active in during this time were alt.support.boy-lovers, alt.fan.prettyboy, and alt.eunuchs.questions.
The group alt.eunuchs.questions was created in 1996 in order to promote a sexual interest in voluntary castration. Initially, the group was supported by Canadian Shannon Larratt, creator of the website Body Modification Ezine (BME). Larratt was himself a eunuch with an interest in sexual “body modification play.” In addition to graphic content depicting erotic genital torture, BME also hosted personals ads and BDSM fetish porn.
During the early formation of the Eunuch Archive community in the late 90’s, Pidel worked with founding Eunuch Archive site administrator Larratt in order to draft an FAQ primer for new members in which he instructed participants on how to share pornographic sadomasochistic content.
Pidel also stated that the intended purpose of the group was to connect “cutters,” amateur genital surgeons, with “wannabes” seeking to undergo illicit surgical castration.
In response to the question, “What happens to the testicles/scrotum after they are removed?” Pidel remarked that surgical pornography of castration procedures often depicts acts of cannibalism. “Many SM scenes include eating the testicles, raw, or more commonly, cooked — they can be quite tasty lightly cooked in a mushroom sauce,” Pidel suggested, before going on to describe the flavor of the ‘meat’ and how its texture is impacted by prior scrotal torture.
“Some castrators (and eunuchs) are also ‘trophy hunters’,” Pidel continued. “Testicles will be ‘pickled’ in formaldehyde, and scrotums may be tanned and kept as satchels. There are trophy hunters who have collections with literally hundreds of testicles.”
Reduxx has previously identified one such “trophy hunter” as another member of the Eunuch Archive. Jack Wayne Rogers, a sadistic pedophile convicted on charges related to the possession of child pornography, interacted with Pidel in the Eunuch Archive Usenet forum. Rogers was also a “cutter” who performed surgical castrations while filming the procedures as pornography.
Prior to his arrest for the sexual abuse of a child and distribution of child sexual abuse materials, Pidel had also shared a brutally graphic penectomy video within the group, in a move that was defended by Larratt, Rogers, and by academic Krister Willette, whose research directly contributed to WPATH’s latest Standards of Care.
Pidel’s sexual interest in witnessing the violent castration of a man was also defended by the Eunuch Archive’s administrator and director of the group’s Fiction Archive, or graphic erotica section. Keith Lawson, who uses the screen name “Paolo,” is cited in research published by WPATH’s International Journal of Transgenderism, and to this day is active in a leadership role within the Eunuch Archive.
Other content shared by Pidel to the eunuch group included video footage of chemical castration and requests for the drug Leuprolide, now commonly used to halt the pubertal development of minors and referred to as a “puberty blocker.”
Pidel was simultaneously participating in the internet’s longest-running pro-pedophilia forum, Boy Chat. He referenced the group in a July 1998 post to alt.support.boy-lovers while claiming that the online group deterred pedophiles from offending.
“I told my family all about my having sexual urges to boys when I was in my mid teens. Of course they did not take it easily, and still today I have my mother on my back all the time to get ‘help’ for it, even though I have already spent more than a decade and a half in therapy on it, on and off, with various therapists, programs, ministers, priests, and even chemical castration, I am not on that anymore by the way,” Pidel wrote.
“I stopped going to therapy because I was not getting any better, but in fact was getting worse, partly because of that therapy. In fact, finding [Boy Lovers] and [Boy Love] sites on the Internet, like Boy Chat, has done more for me in the last two years than a lifetime of therapy has done for me. I am even less at risk for going to boys for sex than ever in my life, because of the BLs and BL sites on the net, contrary to popular myth that it makes a pedophile more likely to offend or have the sex.”
In January 2004, according to court records, federal investigators searched Pidel’s residence in Pine Hill, New York, and discovered “hundreds of computer images of actual minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct”, some of which involved children under the age of 12 being sexually abused. By his own admission, the child pornography was obtained by Pidel via Usenet newsgroups such as alt.svens.house.of.12year-old.lust.
In addition, in the period between January 1999 and March 2003, Pidel had taken sexually explicit images of a 9 year-old boy at the youth hostel, Belleayre, that he ran in Pine Hill. Court records state that Pidel “had been engaging in oral sex with this minor and touching the minor’s genitals.”
After his arrest in 2004, Pidel provided information confirming that he was connected with approximately 15 men who were part of a group called “boyloversunited,” which was devoted to the sexual exploitation of young boys. However, altogether, over 40 men were arrested in connection to the pedophile ring.
“These individuals chatted often in Yahoo chat rooms and communicated on Yahoo bulletin boards. This group participated in two camping trips in 2003 at a camp ground near Six Flags Amusement Park in New Jersey. During these trips, two young boys, age 12, were present and sexually abused. One of the boys was the son of one of the members. This member not only abused his son, but allowed other men to do so,” states the March 2005 sentencing report.
“These men also met at [Pidel’s] youth hostel one Thanksgiving holiday with one of these boys. It appears that this boy was abused by one of the men during this holiday. Further, the defendant informed the government that members of ‘boyloversunited’ also have held other meetings in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.”
One of the men in “boyloversunited” who had raped at least two 12 year-old boys was also behind the creation of a website, boylovers.org, which hosted a chat group. Pidel had supplied this man, who went unnamed in court records, with child pornography videos, and he attended various trips and excursions to the youth hostel where Pidel worked.
Boylovers.org stated its mission was to “foster a friendly & supportive community for boylovers and those who support them. In addition is it our ambition to facilitate an environment which conveys the true nature of boylove to both follow boylovers and general society.”
Additionally, the site was described as “a place where boylovers can come to make friends, find support, and feel accepted,” with a goal “to help strengthen the boylove community in ‘real-life.’”
One of the men arrested following federal officers’ investigation into Pidel was truck driver Robert Pelle, who had adopted a boy to sexually abuse. It is likely that this is the child referenced in court records as the “son of one of the members” who was handed over to the other men for abuse.
Pelle’s computer had previously been seized on suspicion of possession of child pornography, but law enforcement neglected to search the device for months – during which time, the young boy was returned to the care of the child sexual abuser.
For his role in the production and distribution of child pornography, and for the abuse of a minor, Pidel received a prison sentence of a combined 271 months, or 22 years. The investigation had also linked “boyloversunited” to a Belarus-based child pornography enterprise, and a money laundering scheme “involving thousands of paid memberships to 50 pornography Web sites,” as reported by Poughskeepie Journal.
Reduxx has located a website Pidel had designed in 2000 which details his “fixation on castration.”
“Tom’s Self-Extreme Page” praised “emasculation” by means of castration as “the final frontier,” and provided his date of birth, e-mail address, and location, thereby confirming his identity as Pidel.
“The farthest back I remember all this starting was when I was as young as 8, possibly 9. I don’t know how it started, just that it did. I have a vivid memory of looking at my balls and thinking of them being cut off and how I would look then, like a girl,” Pidel confessed.
“I am not a transsexual, nor do I crossdress, and I don’t fantasize about being a girl, but at that age I wondered what it would be like to have no balls or penis, and when I saw pictures of nude girls (young ones) or saw a nude girl (nudism lifestyle) I would use that vision as how I would look if I cut my balls and penis off, and I liked that.”
Pidel described how discovering the Eunuch Archive was, for him, “like Blackbeard finding a sunken ship full of treasure,” while noting that content depicting “real life castrations” of participants were shared within the forum’s chat group. Reduxx has also seen video footage of castration surgeries offered for sale through the community. The video footage is often used by members for sexual gratification in the same manner as pornography.
The convicted pedophile referenced, as a role model, one of the members of the forum, known only as “Gay Gelding,” who performed clandestine genital surgeries for sexual pleasure.
Last year, Reduxx unmasked another member of the Eunuch Archive community as a sadistic pedophile who had performed a makeshift “gender reassignment surgery” on a young man and claimed to have conducted over 100 similar procedures. Jack Wayne Rogers is currently incarcerated at the Federal Corrections Institute in Miami after investigators discovered child pornography on his devices that included sadistic abuse of prepubescent children.
One man who was chemically castrated as a minor after participating in the Eunuch Archive forum has since gone on to become a psychiatrist and registered member of WPATH.
Dr. James ‘Jame’ Agapoff said, in a video he published to YouTube, that he was an adolescent, aged “less than fifteen,” when he began participating in the Eunuch Archive forum. Through the website, Agapoff initiated an email correspondence with Dr. Felix Spector, who wrote him a prescription for Medroxyprogesterone, and stated that he believed Agapoff would be a “good candidate” for a castration procedure in the future.
Dr. Felix Spector, now deceased, had advertised his services on his website, where he stated that he specialized in “the treatment of the transgendered and those with overactive sex drive,” and boasted of decades of experience working with “the transgendered and those in need of libido control.”